Guinness Cheddar

Crafted by the expert cheesemakers at Windyridge Cheese in Somerset, Guinness Cheddar is the worlds first official Guinness infused cheese. Due to our previous working relationship, the folks at weareshuffle approached me to help them bring the Guinness Cheddar website to life.

Working from designs provided by the talented Ollie Bowie, and with content and art direction from the team at weareshuffle, the Guinness Cheddar site perfectly represents the history and authority of the Guinness Brand. It also including some fun and interesting finishing touches to give it some added depth. These include up to date weather reports for Dublin and Wincaton with animated SVG icons, dynamic whole page scrolling effects and parallaxing ‘Liffey’ lines (a hallmark of the Guinness brand).

As Guinness Cheddar is affiliated with an alcoholic beverage, it is legally required to have some sort of age verification block on the site. There are several ways to do this, however, to make sure that the SEO of the site was not negatively effected I decided to go with a Javascript solution. To begin with the site is blocked from view, and is only revealed once you select your country and put in a date of birth that meets the legal drinking age of that country. Once the age verification gate is passed, a cookie is stored to the users computer that allows the age verification gate to be bypassed for seven days.

One of the main requirements of the site was the ability for the team at Guinness Cheddar to upload both news posts and recipes to separate sections of the site. To make this possible in the WordPress dashboard I created a custom post type called ‘Recipes’ that had several custom fields, including ingredients and method and then created a totally separate index page for these posts.

As this was a brand new product, it was important to make sure that the site was fully optimised for search engines. As well as ensuring that the correct practices were followed during the build stage, I also advised the team at Guinness Cheddar on the best way to write their content, and how to write custom meta snippets to ensure that people searching for the site could find what they were looking for quickly. As a result of this, the Guinness Cheddar site ranks at the top of the results when searching for ‘Guinness Cheese’ and ‘Guinness Cheddar’.